"We want to create the renegade spirit of the original," says Gemma Bodinetz, the artistic director of Liverpool's new Everyman. That, I suspect, will depend on the work. But Bodinetz and her team start with the advantage of an absolute cracker of a building: one adorned outside with portraits of 105 Liverpudlians, filled inside with generous communal spaces and leading to a 400-seat brick-walled auditorium that is wide, open and inviting. As at London's Young Vic, architect Steve Tompkins has created a theatre where you feel people will want to hang out.

How to kick off a new theatre is always the problem and Bodinetz has shrewdly opted for a familiar classic rather than a brand-new work. Her production is also charming, intelligent and full of good things. Its one drawback is that it runs close to three and a half hours, which is too long for Shakespeare's Illyrian fantasy. What extends the running time is that designer Laura Hopkins, having started with a space that is virtually bare except for a large mirror and a standing pool, gradually fills it with stuff including a flower-bedecked avenue for the garden scene. If the production could only speed up the breaks between scenes, it would be really something.

Bodinetz shows her intent by having Adam Levy's white-suited, self-dramatising Orsino repeat the play's opening-word, "If", three times as a prelude to a visual coup introducing the shipwrecked Viola. As scholar Michael Dobson has pointed out, the whole play seems to take place within a conditional clause, asking "what if" there were a country such as Illyria. Bodinetz seizes on that idea to present us with a series of interlocking fantasies in which people lose their sense of self: there's a telling moment when Jodie McNee's disguised Viola, asked by Natalie Dew's Olivia "What are you? What would you?", looks totally flummoxed as if she herself is unsure.

The chief beneficiary of the fascination with fantasy is Nicholas Woodeson's superb Malvolio. Woodeson, a member of the Everyman company in 1974, presents us with a prim, trim little fusspot who reveals his hidden origins only when he inadvertently says "laff" for "laugh". But Woodeson comes into his own in the garden scene. Spotting the tell-tale letter, his first reaction is to plonk it in the litter basket. When he finally reads it, he enters into his own,fully imagined private world like a man in the grip of a mad dream. It is disturbing as well as funny: I just wish a fine performance were not upended, quite literally, by the bizarre decision to invert Malvolio's body in the prison scene so that only his yellow-stockinged feet peep through the grating.

There are other odd choices, such as having Paul Duckworth's Feste fulfil his dream by sporting high heels and lipstick: where's the textual evidence that jesters are androgynous? I'd also have liked a bit more of Sir Toby Belch's caclulating cruelty from Matthew Kelly. But the trio of lovers, especially McNee's fine Viola, exude the right perplexity and the narcissism of passion is well caught as characters gaze at their reflections in the floor's inlaid mirrors. Much thought has clearly gone into a production that, for all its lack of momentum, gets the new building off to a bright start.